Anonymous access to Vim's CVS repository

This document gives a brief overview of how to access the vim code using anonymous (readonly) CVS using the CVS pserver method.

If you're already familiar with CVS

Here are the parameters you need to know:

method	pserver
repository	cvs.vim.org:/cvsroot/vim
login	anonymous
password	(none)

If you're a CVS newbie

First you have to log in:

When prompted for a password for anonymous, simply press the Enter key. To check out the MAIN development branch (MAIN trunk) use the cvs command checkout or it's abbreviation co:

The -z3 makes the CVS server compressing the files before transferring them with a gzip level 3. The files are automatically unzipped by your CVS client. Please use always compressed transfer to reduce netload. I recommend to create a file ~/.cvsrc which these lines:

The line update -P -d makes CVS purging empty directories (-P) and checking out newly added directories on a later update. Once you've checked out the code you can easily update it from time to time. Go to the newly created directory and type

All information about the repository, login, module and branch is stored by CVS in the subdirectories CVS, so that you don't have to care about this any more. The password (in this case it's empty) is stored in ~/.cvspass. You can move the checked out source around, you can even move it to another machine without loosing the ability to do a CVS update.

Modules

To check out a specific module you must use

Currently there's only the vim module

Branches

The MAIN trunk always contains the latest development version. To check out a different branch you must specify the name of the branch with the -r switch:

here's a summary of branches for the module vim

MAIN	latest development version. This is what you get if you omit the -r switch.
vim57002	vim-5.7 and patches for this version.
vim-5-8	vim-5.8 and patches for this version. vim-5.8 is considered a most stable version of vim.